One of my coaching clients is taking his leadership team to Phoenix next week for an offsite planning meeting. (He invited me to come and help out, but my schedule wouldn’t allow it. Too bad, Phoenix is nice this time of year!) If you’ve been around as an organizational leader for awhile, you’ve no doubt participated in leadership team offsites. Whether they gather at a nice hotel in a warm place or someplace less exotic, it’s a good idea for an organization’s leaders to periodically change the scenery and step back to reflect on what’s happened and look ahead to future goals.
Here’s my question for you. When was the last time you took a personal leadership offsite? I ask that question regularly of my clients and groups that I’m speaking to. Occasionally, someone will say that they’ve had one recently, but most people have not. This trend reminds me of the old line about the shoemaker’s children having no shoes. Leaders tend to give so much time and attention to the development of their organizations that they often leave little space for their own development.
I’m not exactly sure how we decided to start, but my wife, Diane, and I have taken an annual Fall/Winter retreat for the past 15 years. The first couple of years were at a $25 a night one room cabin on a farm in Pocahontas County, West Virginia. Since then, we’ve held it at some places that are a little less rustic. Whether it’s a rural or an urban setting, we’ve come up with a routine that works for us. Since this is the time of year when people are beginning to look back on the past 12 months and look ahead to the next 12, I thought I’d share some of our lessons learned about how to take a personal leadership offsite.
Have you seen the new smart phone commercial where the guy is standing in the middle of the desert and all of the thousands of people in his information stream are rushing at him? It’s from Motorola. It’s 30 seconds long and worth a quick look.
It’s funny because it’s true. We recognize ourselves as that guy. The information is washing over us like a flood and we just want to strain out the things that matter most. It’s a challenge for everyone, but I think it’s a particular challenge for leaders.
There may have been a time long ago when leadership looked like a monologue. Think of the great orator in the town square delivering a long speech to people who were actually listening. Over time, leadership evolved to include dialogues. Effective leaders learned how to have conversations with individuals or groups to identify and work on the most important issues. In 2009, I think we’ve seen the emergence of the multi-logue. The rapid adoption of social media like blogs, Facebook and Twitter has created an environment in which a countless number of conversations are going on at anytime. (See this post on the social media explosion for a quick primer.)
One of the big responsibilities of an executive coach is to help the client step back to a broader perspective and observe how what he’s doing connects or disconnects with the results he’s trying to get. It’s helping the client move, as Harvard’s Ron Heifetz would say, off the dance floor and onto the balcony. I don’t know for sure, but based on recent reporting, I’d have to guess that no one is providing that kind of support to Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs. As the Financial Times thoroughly summarized this week, Goldman finds itself the subject of an unexpected shift from headquarters of the masters of the universe to object of universal scorn and anger over the $17 billion bonus pool it has set aside one year after taking billions of dollars in Federal assistance. Not content to fly under the radar screen (which wasn’t really possible in the first place), Goldman CEO Blankfein recently gave a long interview to the Sunday Times of London in which he said, among other interesting things, that he’s just a simple banker, “doing God’s work.”
Talk about pouring gasoline on a fire. If I was coaching Lloyd Blankfein, there are three basic questions I’d want to ask him to help him reframe his perspective and better align his actions with the results required in this new situation. Ideally, we would have talked through these questions about a year ago. It may too late for them to do any good now, but here they are:
If you happen to have 100 million Euros (about $150 million) to spare, you might be in the market for the yacht, The Why, pictured to the left. Yes, that’s the stern of a boat that was featured in the House & Home section of a recent edition of the Financial Times Weekend.
As described in the FT, The Why is a one of a kind yacht with 3,400 meters of guest space and an optimal cruising speed of only 12 knots. (You can see more pictures of The Why at http://www.why-yachts.com .)
I’m taking a wild guess here, but I’m doubting that very many of my readers are in the market for a $150 million boat. (I know I’m not! Not in this lifetime, anyway.)
So what’s the point of all this in a leadership blog? It’s this excerpt from the FT quoting Pierre-Alexis Dumas, one of the designers of the 12 knot yacht:
For the past four years, the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership has conducted an annual public opinion poll to determine the sector leaders in which Americans have the most and least confidence and the factors behind those confidence levels. The 2009 results have just been released and there are some pretty interesting conclusions.
First, the sectors where the confidence level in leaders are up in a statistically significant way over last year are the military, the executive branch and business. Those that showed a significant decline are medical, nonprofits and charity, state government, the news media and Wall Street. Based on an index where 100 indicates a moderate amount of confidence the only three sectors that scored higher than that level were the military, medical and nonprofits and charity. Of those three, the military is the only sector to score well above 100 on the confidence index with a score of almost 120.
According to the study, there are six key factors that have the greatest impact on Americans’ confidence in their leaders. These factors are:
As an executive coach, speaker and author of The Next Level, Scott Eblin advises hundreds of executive leaders every year. The Next Level Blog is where he shares "news you can use" to raise your leadership game.
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